Dreaming Is a Political Act: How Imagination Shapes What Becomes Possible

Girls are Full of Power: Dreaming Expands Possibility, Worldbuilding Brings it to Life, is a year-long series that explores dreaming and worldbuilding—grounded in the praxis of girls and young feminists—as a vital political practice for systemic change. Drawing on research and experiences from multiple countries, the series highlights how girls and young feminists are not only confronting injustice but actively imagining and building alternative futures.

I have a dream that one day we will all have access to opportunities….regardless of anything….So, every night, before I sleep, I think about my day and ask [myself]: how did I really contribute to the change?

And, until we reach the society that I dream, I will keep raising my voice. I will keep dreaming. This is resistance.

– Anisie Byukusenge, Rwanda, Our Resistance: Stories of Disability Rights Activists      

What becomes possible when we practice imagination as a discipline of hope and freedom—a tool for collectively believing in and building new worlds?

And what might we reclaim, if we refused to mistake the inherited conditions of this world for the limits of what is possible, while drawing from the understanding that worldbuilding is an intergenerational practice—one carried by those who, even amid broken and violent worlds, have chosen love over despair, faith over cynicism, and justice over resignation?

Imagination and dreaming are forms of power. They allow us to expand our sense of possibility beyond current systems of violence, injustice, ecological and systemic crisis, and oppression. To dream of radically different worlds is to refuse the normalization of path dependency and dystopia.

Imagination is not separate from transformation—it is one of the essential conditions that makes transformation possible. Girls and young feminists have long understood this.

For much of history—and still today—the world has tried to narrow girls’ horizons. It asks them to dream smaller, and at times, not to dream at all. Systems of oppression blocks dreaming by flooding the mental and emotional space where dreaming would happen with constant urgency, scarcity, surveillance, and crisis response, so there is no interior quiet left to imagine from.

Yet amid co-constitutive systems of oppression—misogyny, patriarchy, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, casteism, ableism, and others—girls and young feminists across the globe continue to dream and imagine different futures. They are resisting, envisioning justice, and creating new ways of living, relating, and organizing. Their visions are blueprints for the worlds they are already building through daily acts—both large and small.

Here, we offer insights drawn from our latest research, Dreaming and Worldbuilding: Insights, Strategies, and Calls to Action Grounded in the Dreams and Power of Girls and Young Feminists, and make the case for why investing in their dreams matter. As co-authors, we have spent years documenting hundreds of examples of girls’ and young feminists’ dreaming and worldbuilding across Argentina, India, Jordan, Kenya, Romania, Tanzania, the United States, and beyond through play sessions. Our methods use a Dreaming and Worldbuilding Game designed to create space for participants to imagine new worlds through play. The results are often imagined realities that are radically different from the current systems underway with recurring themes such as mutuality, care, joy and wellbeing.

Imagination is not separate from transformation—it is one of the essential conditions that makes transformation possible.

When practiced collectively, we see firsthand these dreams take shape in new ways of living, relating, organizing, creating, and caring for one another. This is the work of worldbuilding: the ongoing practice of imagining and building futures rooted in justice, dignity, and collective liberation.

Dreaming and building new worlds are not forms of escape from reality. Rather, they are a direct response to the wounds of the present, laying the foundation for how reality begins to change gradually and how we heal together.

The question, then, is whether the rest of us are willing to place our institutions, our resources, and our own imaginations in service of the worlds that girls and young feminists are already bringing into being.

Girls and Young Feminists: Architects of Possibility

Long before formal movements had language for worldbuilding, girls and young women were already its original architects. They named what was needed, tended what could grow, and passed down ways of creating life and meaning that survived every attempt to erase them from the story of who gets to be called a creator. What girls and young feminists practice today is a continuation of that ancestral lineage, not an exception to it. To dream collectively, then, is also to remember: to reach back for a form of creative authority that was always theirs, even when history recorded it under other names or did not record it at all.

In doing so, girls and young feminists have cultivated sophisticated practices of collective dreaming, care, storytelling, organizing, and resistance that make new futures possible. Across communities and movements, these practices constitute a body of political knowledge about how more just worlds are imagined, nurtured and built under conditions of constraint, providing vital lessons for anyone committed to systemic transformation.

Dreaming is often an act of resistance against poverty, harmful gender norms, child marriage, teenage pregnancy, unpaid care work, gender-based violence and unequal access to education and opportunity—systems that attempt to define a girl’s future before she has the chance to define it herself. To dream of becoming a leader, an entrepreneur, a policymaker or a changemaker is to reject the limits imposed by circumstance and reclaim the right to shape one’s own future.

Author, Rachel Cargle notes that even Harriet Tubman “was known for her predictive visions, which started after an injury she endured at 13 years old. She began to fall unexpectedly into sleep-like states and reemerge with stories of her vivid dreams. These dreams would often support her navigation of dozens of enslaved people to freedom.”

In the publication, Dreaming Awake, Cargle shares: “It is said, one morning in 1860…Harriet Tubman came to the breakfast table singing the words, ‘My people are free! My people are free.’ Reportedly, she was unable to eat due to the excitement her body held that morning. It wasn’t until 1863, three full years later, that the emancipation of African-Americans took place—but that night, Harriet had such a vivid dream of freedom that she celebrated as though it had already been achieved.”

Every dream becomes a declaration that a girl’s life is not confined to the realities she inherited, but can be transformed through courage, collective action and opportunity. When girls and young feminists are trusted, resourced and given spaces to lead, their dreams grow beyond individual aspirations; they become acts of political imagination that challenge inequality, inspire communities and contribute to building the just and equitable world that girls and young feminists have long envisioned.

Why Worldbuilding Matters Now

At a moment marked by democratic erosion, deepening inequality, ecological and systemic crisis, and rising authoritarianism, many institutions remain trapped in cycles of reaction and short-term problem solving. The crises we face are not entirely new; they are old wounds deepened and accelerated by our times and systems that are reinforcing and iteratively destructive and oppressive. Presently, we are particularly burdened by years of compounding political, environmental, and social crises globally. The cumulative political discourse and its trajectories seek to deny the rights of marginalized communities and establish public policy that is violent and exclusionary.

Too often in response to these challenges, we continue to reach for the same tools, rely on the same assumptions, and reproduce the same patterns that brought us here. We speak of transformation while overlooking those who have long been imagining and practicing new ways of living, relating, and organizing. Perhaps what this moment demands is not simply better solutions, but a broader imagination.

How might we think differently about change? What becomes possible when we move beyond managing crises and begin cultivating possibility? And what might we learn from the communities—especially girls and young feminists—who have long been creating new ways of living, relating, and organizing, even in the face of systems designed to control and erase them?

As historian Robin D.G. Kelley notes, “the only way to ensure survival for Black people was to envision a radically different future”—and this notion remains applicable for all of us, across all identities, in both our survival and our flourishing.

Becoming Worldbuilders

Imagination does not happen in a vacuum. We have to be deliberate about fostering the conditions that allow girls and young feminists to dream, imagine and build worlds together. Dreaming and building new worlds requires resources: time, emotional capacity, rest, suitable places to gather, trusting relationships, and the freedom to imagine beyond immediate survival.  These are often treated as secondary to the “real work” of organizing. In reality, they are part of the very infrastructure that makes movements resilient, creative, and capable of imagining futures beyond the crises of the present.

Girls and young feminists are best positioned to identify what those conditions are. The role of allies, including movement partners and donors, is not to prescribe them, but to make them possible. Supporting this means financing without controlling, listening without correcting, accompanying without imposing. It means trusting girls and young feminists to identify what they need and resourcing those needs generously rather than conditionally.

Too often, however, philanthropy and movement resourcing operate through a logic of scarcity. Girls and young feminists are asked to continually prioritize urgent needs, respond to crises, and justify every investment in imagination, care, or community. Yet these are not distractions from organizing; they are among the very conditions that make transformative organizing possible. If we believe worldbuilding is political work, then creating the conditions for imagination is essential.

This means offering girls and young feminists more. It requires not only more financial resources to sustain their organizing and respond nimbly to rapidly changing realities, but also more time to rest, more space to gather, more opportunities to dream, and more freedom to cultivate the relationships and collective practices from which new worlds emerge.

This invites a different way of thinking about resourcing altogether—echoing the principles of Buen Vivir: an understanding that wellbeing is grounded in reciprocity, relationships, and collective flourishing rather than extraction and accumulation. Within this worldview, wealth is measured not by output or endless growth, but by balance: enough rest, enough connection, enough time to feel, create, and dream; enough reciprocity that no one—human, animal, river, or land—is treated as a resource to be used up.

Dreaming is what allows people to imagine alternatives to extractive systems in the first place. Once those alternatives become tangible visions rather than distant ideals, abundance in time, care, rest, relationships, and shared resources can be recognized as forms of wealth rather than sacrifice.

To fund girls’ and young feminists’ worldbuilding through this lens is to reject the extractive logics that so often shape philanthropy itself. It is to ask a different question: not how to maximize outputs, but what conditions allow life—all life—to flourish.

The role of movement partners and donors, then, is not to become architects of these worlds, but to help ensure that girls and young feminists have the resources, relationships, and freedom to keep building them.

The Work Underway: Worldbuilding as a Political Practice

Worldbuilding as a political practice, rather than a therapeutic exercise, names the harm and, in the same breath, insists on an alternative while rehearsing it. From the freedom to express, question, and be curious, to connection with land and ecological harmony, to reclaiming joy, rest, and play—the expressed dreams of girls and young feminists form a single, coherent map for a different way of living together.

Our research, Dreaming and Worldbuilding: Insights, Strategies, and Calls to Action Grounded in the Dreams and Power of Girls and Young Feminists, synthesizes the collective dreaming and worldbuilding processes alongside girls and young feminists across multiple countries and contexts. Drawing on data collected over several years of active engagement in worldbuilding processes we noticed one pattern persisted: dreaming is never neutral.

In a moment defined by politics of cruelty—where authoritarian and fascist projects openly attack the bodies, mobility, and futures of girls, women, and queer people—dreaming becomes something more than imagination. It becomes a tool of self-defense. To dream collectively is to refuse the isolation that cruelty depends on; it is to deliberately build spaces of tenderness, presence, joy, and deep feeling that these regimes cannot reach or dismantle. Exercising dreaming as a form of resistance, arms ourselves—and our communities—with seeds of care, memory, and collective vision strong enough to resist.

In this spirit, we are grateful to the girls and young feminists who continue to dare to dream, to build, and to remind us that another world is not only possible—it is already taking shape. For example, in Villa 31, Buenos Aires, Argentina, the girls and young women who make up La Nuestra Fútbol Feminista imagined feminist football pitches—well-lit, safe, open to all bodies, desires, and identities. In Jordan, girls imagined communities where everyone belonged without fear or judgment. In Kenya and Tanzania, they envisioned schools and communities that nurtured curiosity, leadership, and collective care rather than conformity and exclusion.

In Romania, they imagined restoring relationships with forests, rivers, and the more-than-human world through reciprocity rather than extraction. In India, girls imagined worlds filled with color, creativity, and beauty, insisting that art and joy are not luxuries but conditions for thriving. Across these and many other contexts, girls’ dreams were not fantasies of castles or unreachable utopias. They are, instead, precise diagnoses of what is broken, and at the same time, equally precise architectures for repairing it.

To dream, in this sense, is not only a poetic act; it is a political tool that recovers ancestral ways of knowing. Dreaming changes how we know, what we value, and ultimately what we believe is possible.  It allows ideas and possibilities to be organized from a different order entirely.  Systems of domination teach us to analyze the world through absence—to begin with what is broken, scarce, impossible, or beyond reach.

These systems also depend on convincing us that the present order is inevitable. Dreaming interrupts that inevitability by proposing another starting point. By naming what we long for, what we need, and the worlds we begin to build, girls and young feminists refuse the assumption that today’s conditions define tomorrow’s possibilities.

This is an act of epistemological rebellion. It shifts our attention from managing scarcity to cultivating abundance; from asking what can be preserved to imagining what can be created. Naming a dream—of a football pitch, a clean river, a joyful school, or a community where everyone belongs—is already the beginning of building it. In naming this way, we cleanse the body, the mind, and the spirit of the historical wound of scarcity, of expropriation, of pain, and compel ourselves to reclaim agency. To name abundance is already to begin inhabiting it. 

The Possibilities 

To dream is the most serious and loving way to persist. It is how girls and young feminists protect life when the systems meant to protect them fail. And it is perhaps the clearest evidence we have that another world is not simply possible—it is already, quietly and fiercely, underway.

Girls and young feminists worldbuilding do not depend on the world around them softening first and granting them permission.  Across the globe, their worldbuilding unfolds now—amid scarcity, fear, and political systems that would rather they not dream at all. And it is precisely across this multiplicity of contexts that their power becomes visible.

These are not isolated dreams but a constellation of dreams that, taken together, become a collective force. Each territory brings its own wisdom, its own urgency, its own way of resisting. Together they weave a web of political imagination that no authoritarian project can dismantle all at once.

The question is not whether another future is possible. It is whether we are willing to recognize these practices of worldbuilding, learn from them, and help create the conditions for them to flourish.

For more on this topic:

Dreaming and Worldbuilding: Insights, Strategies, and Calls to Action Grounded in the Dreams and Power of Girls and Young Feminists

The Creative and Political Power of Dreaming

Dreaming and Worldbuilding Game—an imaginative game inspired and seeded by girls and young feminists